From Tom Kim and the Pope to Holly Sonders, Last Week Had Everything

It wasn’t an average week in golf news. Here’s a recap from Gary Van Sickle.

If last week had its own Mount Rushmore of golf, the faces chiseled into the stone would belong to Steve Stricker, Holly Sonders, Tom Kim and Pope Francis.

That is The Ranking’s way of saying it wasn’t your average week of golf news. For your convenience, the rest of this story is printed in English …

10. Every comeback has a starting point. Former Golf Channel favorite Sonders is trying to return several years after her run at Fox Sports in golf and football. On her blue-checkmark Twitter account, she describes herself as “sportscaster and bombshell” and touts, “Girls can be hot and smart.” Her Twitter photos feature her in a variety of racy poses and nothing-left-to-the-imagination lingerie. She tweets: ”About to start my own YouTube to talk about anything and everything. It’s been way too long since people have heard me speak. First topic should be … what?” Hmm. Maybe, “So what do you think about Tom Kim?”

9. Attention, big-dog college golfers. Anybody out there still want to second-guess Oklahoma State star Eugenio Chacarra’s decision to pass up the PGA Tour and go to LIV Golf? Chacarra just won the LIV Golf event in Thailand. That’s $4 million. He also played on the winning team. That’s another $750,000. He hadn’t finished better than 24th in the 48-man fields in the first five events but now, vindication. Said Chacarra: “I feel this was the best for me and for my future. The PGA Tour University doesn’t give you much; it can give you just six events and then if you don’t play good …” LIV offered a guaranteed paycheck and the chance at a huge payday. One Twitterati noted that Chacarra still isn’t eligible for any major championships. But at the bank, his account is now major.

8. The Vatican archives were always missing one thing, an inscribed souvenir with the name of the world’s greatest golfer on it. And now … OK, it’s still missing that item, but Pope Francis does have a replica Ryder Cup inscribed with the names of Zach Johnson and Luke Donald, captains of the Ryder Cup teams that will play next year in Italy. During a media tour in Rome, they scored a private audience with Pope Francis, who did once meet a 6-month-old tiger cub at the Vatican but never that other, more famous Tiger. “Clearly, today was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity,” said Johnson.

7. How to strike the right chord with a tournament trophy: The Constellation Furyk & Friends tournament awarded a special guitar-shaped trophy to its latest champion, Steve Stricker, who beat Harrison Frazar by two strokes.

Final group, Miguel Angel Jimenez, ⁦@PhilMickelson⁩ and ⁦@SteveFleschGolf⁩ are off in ⁦@FurykandFriends⁩. ⁦@TimuquanaCC⁩ ⁦@jaxdotcom⁩ pic.twitter.com/DmdIrfyGNt

— Gsmitter (@gsmitter) October 10, 2021

The winner’s trophy was a custom-built guitar handcrafted “from cut and processed bronze with a high polish and texture finishes in Rhodium Plate.” We all know how exclusive rhodium plate is these days. The trophy is 14 inches tall and rests on a two-tiered wooden base with an engraved skyline and title plate. The Ranking can’t wait to see how it looks in Stricker’s deer-hunting blind next to the venison jerky.

6. Anyone remember Patrick Reed? The former Masters champion finished second at the LIV Golf event in Bangkok. Congrats to the man who will now be known as Captain Asia.

5. The Battle of the Cavemen begins. As in, which men are going to cave first? That slow drumbeat you hear in the distance is the approach of next year’s Ryder Cup in Italy. The Europeans suffered a butt-whipping of great magnitude last year at Whistling Straits and since then have lost their next captain (Henrik Stenson); probable future captains (Ian Poulter, Lee Westwood) and possible players (Bernd Wiesberger, Sergio Garcia, Sam Horsfield and Pablo Larrazabal) to LIV Golf. Some beleaguered Euros are already suggesting that LIV Golf players should be allowed in the Ryder Cup even though the PGA Tour and its business partner, the DP World Tour, are trying to stamp out the rival league.

Said Jon Rahm after winning the Spanish Open: “The Ryder Cup is not the PGA Tour and European Tour against LIV—it’s Europe versus the U.S., period. The best of each against the other. I wish they (all players) could play but it doesn’t look good.” Is the Ryder Cup the one thing that could bring the two opposing sides to the bargaining table? (The PGA Tour doesn’t run the Ryder Cup, the PGA of America does, so the answer is a polite, “No, ha-ha-ha, that’s pretty funny.”)

4. This one time, he was Patty Icemelt. Accidents happen. Patrick Cantlay, who’d shot a third-round 60, went to the 72nd hole tied with South Korea’s Tom Kim in the Shriners Children’s Open in Las Vegas. Then a major oops ensued. Cantlay hooked his drive into a bush in a ravine, then hit into a pond and finished with a triple bogey, handing Kim the victory. “Obviously, the last hole makes the whole week kind of sour,” said Cantlay. Especially considering The Ranking staff had money riding on him to win … but they’re not bitter. Much.

3. At the LIV Golf event in Bangkok, Bryson DeChambeau spoke to the media after the first round and discussed his disappointment that the Official World Golf Rankings aren’t recognizing LIV: “They’re delaying the inevitable. We’ve hit every mark in their criteria. To not get points is kinda crazy …” (Every mark? Let’s do some fact-checking: An average of 75 players in the field? Nope. Play 72 holes? Nope. A cut after 36 holes? Nope. A qualification process to get onto the tour? Big fat nope. And then there’s the shorts. … Nah, just kidding about those.)

2. Things Ben Hogan Never-Ever Said is the category. The answer is what Stricker said after winning the Constellation Furyk & Friends tournament in response to a question about what was next for him: “I’m going to go up in a tree for a while.” (Note: That’s Wisconsinese for “I’m going deer hunting.”)

1. We now join The Tom Kim era already in progress. Maybe you’d better start paying closer attention to Kim. He won the Wyndham Championship in August to get his PGA Tour card. Not a fluke. Then he was the star of the Presidents Cup while playing on the losing International side. His energy and smile and his theatrics endeared him to the fans in Charlotte that week. And now he takes down Cantlay in Vegas the day after Cantlay shot 60 on a day he shot 62. Is he merely on a heater? It doesn’t look that way, and, don’t forget, there’s a big opening in golf for a global superstar who gets people excited (nothing personal, Scottie Scheffler) since Tiger Woods’s car crash and Phil Mickelson took a job with a different company. Kim is the first player since Woods in 1996 to win twice before he turned 21, and, after Vegas, he passed ex-Masters champ Hideki Matsuyama as the highest-ranked Asian player in the world, moving up to No. 15. “I’m having fun playing the PGA Tour,” Kim said. We can see that.

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